Amazon opens site and shares plans for a second

Amazon has announced the official opening of its new fulfilment centre in Northampton alongside plans to launch a second hub less than 20 miles (32km) away.

The online retailer said the £1bn investment would create 4,000 jobs between the Northampton site, known as STN6, and the one planned for Kettering.

According to Amazon, the Kettering campus will open in the autumn.

"We are super excited as a team to launch STN6 in Northampton... a lot of efforts have been put in," said senior operations manager Adriana Genes.

The Northampton site, an Amazon Robotics Sortable (ARS) fulfilment centre, can store tens of millions of products and has been fitted with a range of new technology - some of which has not been used in the UK before.

Area manager Wiktor Sierko said: "The site is the size of 26 football pitches across four floors and all the floors are robotic.

"There's around 1,600 robots across the floors and around 75,000 ports where we're going to be picking orders for the customers."

Customer deliveries have been under way over the last few days at the £500m site, near junction 15 of the M1, with the company saying 2,000 jobs will eventually be created here.

In March, 500 staff from Amazon's first UK base in Ridgmont, near Brogborough, Bedfordshire, were told they could transfer from the now closed Marston Gate site to Northampton.

According to Amazon, its forthcoming £500m Kettering site will be the UK's largest cross-dock facility - a logistics hub where goods from suppliers are delivered before quickly being sent out again to carriers or customers.

It will also employ about 2,000 permanent workers, who are already being recruited, as well as "hundreds of seasonal roles", Amazon says.

The 900,000 sq ft (83,610 sqm) facility will handle about 20 million items a week.

Bosses have said they are invested £40bn into the UK between 2025-27.

This has included a newly opened fulfilment centre in Hull and a £107m distribution centre in Peterborough, due to open this autumn and create 1,400 jobs.

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